Inside the List

The Doctor Will Thrill You Now: Like a lot of brand-name novelists, Robin Cook drops a new book every year or two — in Cook’s case, medical thrillers with punchy, ominous titles like “Outbreak,” “Terminal” or “Contagion” that invariably land on the list. His latest, “Cell” (new at No. 11), is his 28th hardcover best seller since “Coma” made his reputation in 1977. Cook started his career as a practicing doctor, but eventually devoted himself more and more to writing, where the malpractice premiums are presumably lower. From the start, he has applied himself studiously to his craft. “It’s easier to get a book published if it’s going to be a best seller,” he told an interviewer in 1977, “so I went back to some old New York Times best-seller lists and tried to find books that came from theretofore unknown writers, to try to determine what kind of book had the best chances of making the list. I found the mystery-thriller genre seemed to do this best.” If that approach seems more robotic than inspired, well, so can Cook’s prose — “Cell” may be the first thriller to open with an entire paragraph about insulin molecules. (“Rapidly infiltrating the veins, they rushed headlong into the heart, to be pumped out through the arteries.”) Then again, Cook doesn’t make great claims for himself as a writer. “I’m a storyteller,” he told the CBS reporter Don Dahler earlier this month. “I have never been tempted to wear a turtleneck — big turtleneck, white turtleneck. I don’t drink.”

“You don’t do the pipe,” Dahler said.

“I don’t do the pipe,” Cook agreed. “I see myself, I guess, mostly as a hard worker.”

Snark-Proof: “Glitter and Glue,” Kelly Corrigan’s new memoir about mothers and daughters, holds the No. 2 position on the hardcover nonfiction list. “It would be easy to snark at the clichés,” Nora Krug wrote in a Washington Post review that roundly mocked Corrigan for, among other things, shopping at Talbot’s and promoting her book at the Country Club of Darien, Conn. “You may want to roll your eyes,” Krug continued — but then, she conceded, “you’re more likely to find yourself wiping them.”

Stand-Up Fiction: The entertaining story collection “One More Thing,” by the actor and television writer B. J. Novak, makes a splashy entrance at No. 4 on the hardcover fiction list. As Teddy Wayne notes in his review (coming next week), a number of the collection’s deadpan pieces would be right at home in an absurdist joke book — so it makes sense to learn, from a profile in The Boston Globe, that Novak honed them onstage as part of a comedy routine. “The audiences were the best editors a person could have,” he explained. “If you write something kind of boring and you read it in front of a hundred people, you will feel how boring it is. You will be ashamed and embarrassed, and you will never want to say those sentences again until you make them a lot more interesting.”